Maria Isabel Pires Araújo - Universidade Aberta

ABSTRACT
This study refers to the Parents’ social representations of School and
family. Bearing in mind the sudden social changes, which reflect upon the
structural organization of the families, it is important to understand the parents’
view and the role they attribute to the aims of education and school, with a
special emphasis on their own children’s school. The concept of social
representation is relevant to the study of this matter. In order to develop this
idea, we go through the concept of social representation (Moscovici, 1961) and
the mechanism that lies beneath its construction, according to Vala’s (2996)
and Cabecinhas’s (2004) assumptions. Several authors, like Crahay (2000),
Dubet (2004) and Almeida e Vieira (2006), have been analysing the concept of
school education as an instruction, education and culture provider and its
development not only as an education, socialization and qualification agent, but
also as a means for making the human experiences prevail. Carvalho (2001)
and other legislative documents refer to historical events that determine each of
those roles attributed to school, from the time of the Political Constitution of the
Portuguese Monarchy in 1822 until today. They also highlight the role of School
and family in the process of bringing up and making the younger ones socialize,
together with the expectations that the different family types create about
education and how they transmit it to their children, as stated by Diogo, 1998,
Seabra, 1999.
This study was developed in an elementary school belonging to a school
grouping, and it involved the 207 parents of the 3º ciclo students. It aims mainly
at studying the parents’ social representations of education and School,
understanding any changes that might have occurred in this decade and
analyzing the relationship between school and family in the school where this
study is carried out. The data were collected through an interview survey and a
question, informal contact, school guiding documents, such as the education
project, the report on the internal evaluation of the school grouping, statistics.
The results show that parents deeply believe in the family’s educational role and
intend to make sure that they are a reference to their children as far as
educational values that may contribute to their children’s school achievement
are concerned. They also suggest that parents mainly value education